would happily write this 150 page book with scholarly rigor and accessible prose

Jenn Borgioli Binis@jennbinis.bsky.social · 9h ago

OK. What affirmative vision for public education should I persuade my fellow dem committee members to adopt that will keep children from getting hurt? What words should I carry into my next meeting?

Since we are doing this discourse again: I probably talked to more undergraduates about grad school in the humanities than most people, as it’s part of my job as an advisor. My message: people do all kinds of shit in their 20s, and going to grad school aint the worst if you’re funded for it.

In Slaving States, archaeologists Elizabeth Fentress and Adam Rabinowitz offer a pathbreaking new perspective on the ways ancient societies were shaped and transformed by slave trading. Publishing August 25 (20 October UK/EU pub). Learn more: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

the red state version of acknowledging this problem is turning to “virtue” and “cultural literacy,” i’d love to see dems turn back to dewey a little, not in terms of “projects,” but in terms of the notion that experience is worth tending to even if it doesn’t affect test scores

easy to mock right wing humanities institutes, more difficult to get dems to answer for lapsed commitment to liberal education

I was going to assign the techno-optimism screed to students this semester, but now I think the poor youngins will also have to read this lunacy.

There's something truly amazing about a billionaire lecturing me on the dangers of a future marked by extreme concentrations of power.

I remember when, as an undergrad, I was taught about the links between futurism and fascism. At the time I thought it was just a novel piece of information about the past. Haha! *sob*

It is precisely the people making a living by rolling their eyes at "standpoint epistemology" that most consistently catalogue the details of their own upbringing and identity before almost every piece.

fwiw I always rec taking a break between undergrad and grad school. doing so can help you realize later, if you do get a faculty gig in academia, that all workplaces are sort of hellscape microcosms of broader social issues and that higher ed isn't really unique in this regard.

LLMs will never be there to help underserved groups of children. They will always be there to excuse people who don't want to help underserved children from having to.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 9mo ago

They love to say it's a way to help underserved groups of children too. Extra scary. Forbes, S. H. & Guest, O. (2025). To Improve Literacy, Improve Equality in Education, Not Large Language Models. Cognitive Science. doi.org/10.1111/cogs... PDF: philpapers.org/archive/FORT...

exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!

Dr Katie Twomey@k2mey.eurosky.social · 2d ago

Arguing that LLMs are anything more than a load of numbers going into a complicated mathematical function and spitting some more numbers out. Yes they simulate. But they simulate *language*. They do not simulate the cognitive processes underlying communication.

"Just because a chatbot talks like a therapist doesn't mean it thinks like one. And just because something's cheap & always available doesn't mean it's safe. Guest: "Therapy requires a human-to-human connection... people want other people to care for and about them." www.forbes.com/sites/weskil...

Can We Build AI Therapy Chatbots That Help Without Harming People?

AI mental health chatbots promise affordable and immediate support—but can they be trusted? This Forbes report explores the risks, ethics, and future of therapy bots.

forbes.com

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.” ~ John Muir (1838-1914) #Photography, John Muir.

Red States: We're cutting the humanities at our public universities to spend more money on right-wing indoctrination Blue States: We're cutting the same programs, but to spend more money on AI and the business school.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 3d ago

Centrist Democrats hate humanities scholarship just as much as Republicans do - the difference is that Democrats think humanities teaching is important in the elite private institutions they aspire to send their kids to, but not the actual laborers.

Centrist Democrats hate humanities scholarship just as much as Republicans do - the difference is that Democrats think humanities teaching is important in the elite private institutions they aspire to send their kids to, but not the actual laborers.

25 years of running clinical research trials. If you ask us….. that AI gut is full of it. And we use AI! For analytics and modeling and all sorts of ways to speed trials along…. But that’s such crap

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 3d ago

AI researchers can sure believe all this but biomedical research "curing entire disease classes" involving human subjects takes time. And should take time.

Anyone who thinks the Democrats in their current form are going to rebuild the NEH at anywhere near what it needs to be to support the demand for humanistic knowledge is deluding themselves. When Axelrod talks about “zany, liberal faculty lounge exotica,” he means humanists, not STEM professors

Geoffrey Hughes@geofffhughes.bsky.social · 4d ago

We all know that class discourse is totally vibes-based in the Anglophone world, but so is educational attainment discourse (Hong is a college dropout):

This Center is a spinoff of the right-wing Civitas Institute www.statesman.com/news/educati...

UT quietly opens Center for Humanities but won't say how it was created

UT is adding 14 professors through a new humanities center, though the university has not explained how the initiative was formed.

statesman.com

Working on courses with a supportive library staff — and a library with the resources to be supportive of teaching in a range of fields — opens doors for instructors and students. New kinds of class meeting, new kinds of assignment, new kinds of interaction become possible. Meanwhile there’s genAI.

The most consequential change I’ve experienced in moving from one university to another is that the library at my new place has a large physical collection and, for now at least, a budget for purchasing books. And the biggest effect of this change has been on my teaching, not my research.

Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I fundamentally believe that higher ed reform needs to begin by protecting the mission and labor of libraries

the comparisons with Galileo that everyone is rushing to make are really interesting -- but not for the reasons that most people think the Galileo affair was not an instance of a heroic scientist falling victim to a an all-powerful Catholic Church monolithically committed to obscurity and dogma,

The Associated Press@apnews.com · 4d ago

BREAKING: A Senate committee votes to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to answer questions at COVID hearing.

🚨🚨🚨 ALERT: Vanderbilt's board just launched a horrifying assault on academic freedom that threatens the legitimacy of their university. 1/x #AAUP #academicsky #edusky

Vanderbilt’s Board Declares War Against Academic Freedom

A new policy punishes faculty for speech the trustees deem strays from the core purpose of the university.

insidehighered.com

Somehow things that would have been a background gag in a Verhoeven movie are now just real

There’s a story to be reported about the new Center for Humanities at UT Austin. It’s separate from the School of Civic Leadership. The tenure line hires appear to have been made by the Civitas Institute and the director + several faculty come from the Florida Hamilton School. @insidehighered.com

This is like a "choose your own adventure book". If you choose option A, it will do the next step for you, etc. This is not writing. This is producing text for a grade. Writing has value as a way to figure out what you think and why. If students see this possibility in a product that is/5

A day in the life.

Like Loebs? Every fall semester, I like to remind people that while Perseus has many free Loebs sectioned up into book and chapter, if you want to download and read the public domain Loebs (277 of them) as PDFs or txt files, Duke U's very own Ryan Baumann created _Loebolus 📗📕_. ryanfb.xyz/loebolus/